Server screwed up (/lib/libc.so.7: Undefined symbol "_nsdispatch")

[Victor Starenky]

Actually I am running this without GUI (X is a luxury on this machine) .But
if I restore it from the live CD I understand that all ports I have will be
messed up?
So my only option would be to go and install/reinstall all of them from the
scratch? Building anything that needs Ruby for example takes like 24 hours
on this machine :(
Can you think of any way I could try to fix just the damaged part
(nss/nsswitch)?
Is there any place I could search for the backed up libraries (I think
portupgrade would back them up first?).

Thanks guys, I really appreciate your help!

Victor

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 10:43 PM, Sagara Wijetunga
<sagara at tomahawk.com.sg>wrote:

> Victor Starenky writes:
>
> Hi guys,
> I was running FreeBSD server at home for a few years on an old box for
> mail,
> some web and ftp etc. I've been through a number of upgrades even though
> it's not easy with the box as old as this one (PII 350). Right now I'm at
> 7.0 Release.
> Now last weekend something's screwed up there pretty badly and machine is
> pretty much unusable.
> The sympthom is that pretty much any command results in the following
> error:
> /libexec/ld-elf.so.1: /lib/libc.so.7: Undefined symbol "_nsdispatch"
> Specifically this is thrown when trying to login (after entering login
> name)
> on the console, ssh, ftp.
> This is also thrown for "fetch"or for "ls -l" (plain ls works).
> So I'm lucky to have one root session on the console as I can't login at
> any
> other...
> Most recent thing that might have something to do with it would be an
> (unsuccessful) attempt to portupgrade cups-base. This failed with the error
>
> message of wrong cups client. Now this is not new and I have a number of
> ports that wouldn't upgrade - cups-base, apache for example. But before
> portupgrade would fail without affecting the system. Same cups-base failed
> before without any side effects.
> As I said this might have nothing to do with the errors I'm getting, just
> most recent my actions.
> So currently server is not usable - it won't even accept mail (Currier
> server) with the same error message.
> I tried portupgrade bash but portupgrade itslef also fails with the same
> message. I do have one mean of getting new files there through mounted smb
> directory. I've tried putting all new bash files into
> /usr/ports/distfiles/bash but portupgrade still fails (just a bit further
> now).
> I ran pkg_libchk which shows a bunch of missing libraries, mostly for
> compat4x-i386-5.3_9 but for example courier also misses one:
> courier-0.54.0: /usr/local/libexec/filters/perlfilter misses libperl.so
> At this point I think I'm lost. I'd really rather avoid complete reinstall
> of the server if possible.
> I would greatly appreciate any help troubleshooting the libraries. Still
> hope there is something that can be done other than reinstall.
> Thanks in advance!
> Victor
>
> Hi Victor
>
> What you could do is put it back what is missing/damaged using an live
> FreeBSD CD and get the base system to work again without any GUI.
>
> Regards
> Sagara
>
>